This GREAT thing

Want to know what my yesterday was like? I ate a bunch of junk food I didn’t need to eat, got real distracted from work, and went to bed way too late because I collapsed on the couch at the end of the day and watched THREE episodes of The Gilmore Girls. I wish I could somehow convince myself that it’s just as exciting to be healthy on December 30 as it is on January 1. Myself and every and just about everyone else in this country. (Now that's a secret that could be the basis for a best-selling self-help book.)

Oh, well. We all know the first day of the year is the magic day when we can change anything we want to change, and now maybe the first day of the month can be that for me, too!

In fact, way too much of my work distraction yesterday was brainstorming different ways to spell GREAT. I quickly figured out two things:

• If I was adding anything to this plan, it had to be comically easy, or it would never happen.
• I wanted to be deliberate about what I added, rather than just figuring out the best-sounding combination of buzzwords that spelled something.

So I thought about what would make me look back on January and be happy I had done it. My first thought would be that it would be kind of perfect to find a way to force myself to tackle the dozens of teensy-to-medium chores that have been on my to-do list for a million years. These are things that would take literally just 15 minutes or less, but I still never get around to doing them, and they pile up into one giant heap of annoyances. The obvious words for that are Task or To-Do or Chore, but to make the cutesy acronym work, I’m going with Errand.

The next thing that came to mind was gratitude—somehow taking a moment to be deliberately, pointedly thankful for my life. I’m not sure what form this would take—maybe for me just blogging about it would suffice. So, fine. But I can’t call it Gratitude because G is already taken. And I can’t call it Thankfulness because T is already taken. So A is for…Appreciation!

I think this GREAT thing could work for me, though the awkward acronym somewhat dims the prospects for turning it into a best-selling self-help book.